Drums are sounding on making dramatic changes to the way we treat pensioners, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
IT’S ALL about to kick off for those folk traditionally referred to as “pensioners”. The physical frailties that accompany old age are a given. The small mundane humiliations that accompany them are not.
Recently, I observed a nurse being introduced to a distinguished 70-year-old man and address him loudly as Willie. He was ill but there was nothing wrong with his brain or his hearing – and he had never been called anything but William. The media bolsters this attitude by reducing productive long lives to the lame, catch-all label of “pensioner”.
Try this at home: pigeon-hole all your friends according to their State income/insurance/benefit. So what have you got? “Child benefit claimers”? Lots of them. “Dole claimers”? Growing. “Free fees claimers”? Watch out.
Anyway, it can only get worse. The ground is being carefully laid. Calls for the Government to make older people pay for the national deficit was the first kick at a convention that the aged have earned their retirement (never mind that the vast majority have contributed financially towards it throughout their lives).
Éamon Ó Cuív has refused to rule out a reduction in State pension payments.
Ministers play footsie under the Farmleigh table and head off on holiday, coyly tapping their noses, secure in the knowledge that they will never have to live on a few hundred a week.
Of course, there is nothing original about any of it. Punish the old is an “idea” that has been shuttling around well-upholstered EU technocrats and politicians for a while.
The EU is ageing, irrefutably. There will be a lot more grey hair around (without the money to dye). The working age population is forecast to start shrinking in 2012.
By 2060, there will be only two people of working age for every person above 65. And, oldies, it’s all your fault.
Meanwhile, you won’t hear much about the chaotic, unaligned immigration policies of Fortress Europe’s member states that are speeding us towards that situation. Why have Canada and Australia no such concerns?
Nor about the future shock to the State pension fund of the ESRI-estimated 70,000-strong “brain drain” from Ireland every 12 months. Catastrophic, you reckon?
Yet, how to balance that with NCB Stockbrokers’ spookily-worded note that Ireland had the highest rate of increase in “tax-paying units” in all the EU, for both 2008 and 2009.
That’s babies to you and me. Not so catastrophic then? Who knows?
The whole debate is a great deal more nuanced than pouncing on the old age pension. A nation crying out for hope and positivity would be a stupid nation if it failed to balance this with a hard-headed search for fairness.
We are better informed now. We know about the pensions that accrue to still-serving politicians, those charming sums that keep giving, even to those who move on to well-paid public appointments.
We know something of the array of comparatively young, retired gardaí, Army officers and others, well under “pensioner” age but on good State pensions, who may well be undermining younger applicants by taking lower salaries in their new careers.
We know about the notorious “top-ups”, “severance payments” and index-linked pensions to senior public servants. We are getting our heads around the magnitude of the tax-efficient “pension pots” hidden within the obscenely-remunerated “packages” of company executive and directors.
Meanwhile, as workers on fairly average incomes race to supplement their savaged private pension funds, the Government chooses this time to reduce tax relief to 33 per cent on those increased contributions. But Ó Cuív has failed to put a date on it, so again, we are left guessing.
Either way, does it pass the fairness test? Are they aiming their austerity measures at the right targets?
Remember the harried barrister on an RTÉ documentary some years ago struggling to get his tax-efficient cheques – worth many tens of thousands – into his pension fund before the tax deadline?
Is he on the same playing field as the worker on €60,000 a year and a hopeless defined-contribution pension?
For this week’s cheering insight into tax efficient schemes, do read up on the row at One51’s agm. This racy episode involves apparent patent income (which benefits from tax relief), and a €2 million“bonus” payment, or what the company was also pleased to call “tax efficient dividends”, routed through a whole series of companies – including some outside the group – to nine unnamed One51 executives. How much of that €2 million is likely to be shovelled straight into tax-efficient, pension funds?
The point is that there is no homogeneity about “pensioners”. Nor about “pension pots”. Nor about the start of ageing. But watch out for the escalation of incivilities between “Generation Debt” and the “Baby-Boomers”, manufactured in many cases by beneficiaries of such “Generation Debt” burdens as free university fees, the gap year, cheap flights and dirt-cheap or interest-free loans.
The war is already raging in Britain, where Neil Boorman, a brand expert turned Boomer-baiter, wrote about a “glut of needy pensioners” in a pre-election manifesto called “It’s All Their Fault”.
Neil’s the Man. Accept no cheap imitations.